Thursday, March 29, 2007

The brutality of standup comedy as a performance art is expressed in its vernacular. If the performance goes well, you "kill." If it goes badly, you "die." Kill or die -- it's not just you and the audience, it's you or the audience.

I've died before, and it's not pretty. But last Tuesday night, I killed. I got to perform at another comedy class graduation. The class only had five performers, so the teacher, Leigh Anne, asked if anyone else wanted to perform. Since I'm going to be competing in the local "Laff Off" competition on Sunday and I needed the practice, I volunteered.

I went fourth. The first three comics were kind of so-so. They didn't die --they all had some good bits in their sets -- but didn't really kill either. (I think it's actually almost impossible to die with a graduation audience; they're wonderful.) Nobody really had the audience going from start to finish. So then I went, and bam! I killed. I did the opening from "It's not easy being big,"* "I dated a midget,"** and, of course, "Japanese condoms are too small."

Of course, it's not fair to compare my set with the others, because I only had to do five minutes of my best stuff and I've been working on it for almost a year, so I'm not comparing, but I felt like I kind of made a difference to the show, like I raised the energy level and the funny level. It's kind of a power trip to make a bunch of strangers laugh when you want them too. MUWAHAHAHAHA! And an ego booster too.

The last two comics were really good. There was a woman named Tracy and a Mexiwegian guy named Juan Knudson. Tracy's was more like a one-woman play. It wasn't that funny, but it was a really interesting slice of life kind of thing. And Juan killed the hell out of the audience. He's one funny motherlover, gosh darn him. He'll probably beat me if he's in the Laff Off. The son of a beach.----------*"It's not easy being big. When you're a big guy, complete strangers walk up to you and say things like, 'Hey, you're really big. How tall are you? Are you a basketball player? Are you a football player? Are you a giraffe trainer?' OK, I don't get that one so much. But you never see tall people going around to short people and saying stuff like, 'Hey little fellow, you're really short. How short are you? Are you a jockey? I bet you're really good at miniature golf.' Doesn't happen. Because we're better than that."

**"And it's hard to find tall women to date too. Not that I have anything against short women. I actually used to date a midget, excuse me, a little person. She was quite short, barely more than waist high [hold hand waist high]. She asked me out first. I don't know who put her up to it. (Put her up to it?) At first we got along really well. I was nuts over her. (Nuts over her?) But after a while we didn't get along very well anymore. We had a big argument. She said she'd had it up to here with me [hold hand chin high]. I said I didn't like the way she's always sticking her nose in my business. She said our relationship left a bad taste in her mouth. But I'm not bitter."

3 comments:

It was this particular routine that got me hooked on your blog. Being a tall woman I could tottally relate, completly. I could tell you stories upon stories of short men that wanted to date me because they loved to put their face in my tits...